'Turks' in London: shades of invisibility and the shifting relevance of policy in the migration process

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Forced labour and migration to the UK

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Reviewers in 2009-2010 (Volumes 6 & 7)

Reviewers in 2009-2010 (Volumes 6 & 7) As editors of Migration Letters, we are very grateful to the following colleagues for their reviews and recommendations.Migration Letters, Reviewers

Motivations of UK students to study abroad: a survey of school-leavers

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Intensification of work-place regimes in British agriculture: the role of migrant workers

In Britain, international migrants have very recently become the major workforce in labour-intensive agriculture. This paper explores the causes of the dramatic increase since the 1990s in the employment of migrant workers in this sub-sector. It locates this major change in a general pattern of intensification in agricultural production related to an ongoing process of concentration in retailer power, and in the greater availability of migrant workers, shaped in part by state initiatives to manage immigration. However, within this narrative of change at the national scale, the paper also finds continuing diversity in agricultural workplace regimes. The paper draws on concepts developed in the US literature on agrarian capitalism. It then uses case histories from British agriculture to illustrate how growers have directly linked innovations involving intensification through labour control to their relationships with retailers. Under pressure on ‘quality’, volume and price, growers are found to have ratcheted up the effort required from workers to achieve the minimum wage through reducing the rates paid for piece work, and in some cases to have changed the type of labour contractor they use to larger, more anonymous businesses. The paper calls for further, commodity-specific and spatially-aware research with a strong ethnographic component

Migration costs and observational returns to migration in the developing world

Recent studies find that observational returns to rural-urban migration are near zero in three developing countries. We revisit this result using panel tracking surveys from six countries, finding higher returns on average. We then interpret these returns in a multi-region Roy model with heterogeneity in migration costs. In the model, the observational return to migration confounds the urban premium and the individual benefits of migrants, and is not directly informative about the welfare gain from lowering migration costs. Patterns of regional heterogeneity in returns, and a comparison of experimental to observational returns, are consistent with the model’s predictions

Child migrants in Africa

Child Migration in Africa explores the mobility of children without their parents within West Africa. Drawing on the experiences of children from rural Burkina Faso and Ghana, the book provides rich material on the circumstances of children's voluntary migration and their experiences of it. Their accounts challenge the normative ideals of what a 'good' childhood is, which often underlie public debates about children's migration, education and work in developing countries The comparative study of Burkina Faso and Ghana highlights that social networks operate in ways that can be both enabling and constraining for young migrants, as can cultural views on age- and gender-appropriate behaviour. The book questions easily made assumptions regarding children's experiences when migrating independently of their parents and contributes to analytical and cross-cultural understandings of childhood. Part of the groundbreaking Africa Now series, Child Migration in Africa is an important and timely contribution to an under-researched area

Miliband's mistake on migration

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Remittances and their microeconomic impacts: evidence from Latin America

The flow of remittances to Latin American and Caribbean countries is the highest and fastest growing in the world, exceeding foreign direct investment and net official development assistance to the region. Remittances surpass tourism income and almost always exceed revenues from the largest export in these countries, accounting for at least 10 percent of gross domestic product in six of them. Furthermore, remittances are the least volatile source of foreign exchange in many of these economies, thus playing a crucial role in economic development. ; In what follows, I provide a general overview of the remitting patterns of migrants to the U.S. who are from Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Mexico, Nicaragua, and Peru. Subsequently, I summarize some microeconomic evidence of the impact that remittances have on various spheres of economic development, as is the case with employment, business ownership, education, and health care investments in two LAC economies. These findings underscore the importance of remittances as a resource for the accumulation of human capital investments in education and health and as a determinant of employment patterns in remittance-receiving households in developing economies.Emigration and immigration ; Economic development ; Developing countries ; Emigrant remittances

From first-generation guestworkers to second-generation transnationalists: German-born Greeks engage with the 'homeland'

Few studies have been made of the 'return' of the second-generation children of migrants to their parental homeland. In this paper we examine this 'migration chronotope' for German-born children of the Greek labour migrants who moved to Germany in the early postwar decades, initially as 'guestworkers', later becoming more-or-less settled immigrant communities. We focus on two life-stages of return: as young children brought back to Greece for annual holidays or sent back for longer periods, usually to stay with grandparents; and as young adults exercising an independent return, usually leaving their parents (the first generation) behind in Germany. Our source material is twofold: a review of the limited German literature of the 1970s and 1980s on Greek migration to and from Germany; and our own recent field research in Berlin, Athens and Thessaloniki where we interviewed 50 first- and second-generation Greek-Germans, the majority of them second-generation. We find the practice of sending young children back to Greece to have been surprisingly widespread yet little documented. Often such family separations and transnational childhoods were disruptive, both for the family unit and for the individual child. Memories of holiday visits, on the other hand, were much more positive. Independent, adult return to the parental homeland takes place for five main reasons, according to our interview evidence: (i) a dream-like 'search for self' in the 'homeland'; (ii) the attraction of the Greek way of life over the German one; (iii) the actualisation of a 'family narrative of return' inculcated by the parents but carried out only by the adult children; (iv) life-stage triggers such as going to university in Greece, or marrying a Greek; and (v) return as 'escape' from a traumatic event or an oppressive family situation. Yet adapting to the Greek way of life, finding satisfactory employment and achieving a settled self-identity in the Greek homeland were, to a greater or lesser extent, challenging objectives for our research participants, some of whom had become quite disillusioned with Greece and re-identified with their 'German side'. Others, on the other hand, were comfortable with their decision to 'return' to Greece, and were able to manage and reconcile the two elements in their upbringing and residential history. Comparisons are made with other studies of second-generation 'return', notably in the Caribbean